Even “gerontologically correct” psychologists have failed
to find evidence of increasing wisdom with age. As part
of the Berlin Wisdom Project, Paul Baltes and his colleagues
conducted several studies exploring the relationship of wisdom to
age, and they repeatedly failed to find any convincing
evidence that wisdom, by their measures, increased much at all
from the age of twenty to the age of ninety. It may be
something we intuitively believe, but there’s no empirical data
to support it; as Baltes and his colleague Uta Staudinger put it,
“having lived longer in itself is not sufficient for
acquiring more knowledge and judgment capacity in the wisdom
domain.”

Aristotle had a speech impediment and was orphaned at an early
age; Moses stuttered. Socrates was famously ugly. Pericles had a
head so narrow and congenitally misshapen that Plutarch
describeed it as a “deformity” and recounted that the comic poets
of Athens took malicious glee in calling him “schinocephalos,” or
“squill-head.” Gandhi lamented his frail boyhood body and a
shyness so profound that other children laughed at his reticence.
Confucius’s father died when he was three, and Abraham Lincoln’s
mother died when he was nine. Siddhartha Gautamas mother died
when he was seven days old, and even as a young adult, the future
Buddha was virtually imprisoned by his own father, who was
alarmed by a prophecy that his son would abandon both family and
wealth in search of spiritual awakening.

Across the board, researchers have noticed a connection between
wisdom and early adversity in life.

…some research has located the roots of wisdom as early
as adolescence or early adulthood… wisdom
often grew out of an exposure to adversity early in life. Many
participants in the Berlin Aging Study who rated high on wisdom
testing, according to coauthor Jacqui Smith, had lived through
some of the twentieth century’s most tumultuous events as
children and young adults…

Some theorists argue, however, that natural selection might
care about cultivating a neural mechanism that could modulate
and, in a sense, master the emotional experience of risk. Whether
that mastery is partly acquired early in life, as the
stress-inoculation research suggests, or later in life, as
research by Carol Ryff and her colleagues at the University of
Wisconsin has found, the end result is an enhanced form
of emotional regulation that would clearly confer adaptive power
on anyone who possesses it.

True wisdom involves feelings

Knowledge is merely collected information. whereas emotional
intelligence is a key part of wisdom.

In his valedictory work on wisdom, Baltes attributed the
acquisition of wisdom to a variety of factors—general
intelligence and education, early exposure to meaningful mentors,
cultural influences, and the lifelong accumulation of experience,
which is the centerpiece of developmental psychology. But he,
too, acknowledged the central importance of emotional
intelligence, noting that “there is good reason to
assume that people capable of effectively regulating emotional
states associated with dilemmas of life by cognitive rather than
affective-dysfunctional modes might have a better chance of being
considered wise or scoring high on wisdom tasks.”

The Grant Study, which followed a group of males
from youth to old age, saw that how the men learned to cope with
their emotions was one of the key predictors of both wisdom and
successful lives.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the Grant Study is
how the presence, or lack, of these “wise” defense mechanisms
affected the lives of the Harvard men by the time they reached
middle age. The men who exhibited “mature defenses,” Vaillant
reported in 1977, were happier, more satisfied with their careers
and marriages, and “were far better equipped to work and love”
than their peers who possessed less mature adaptations. They
earned better incomes, engaged in greater public service, had
more rewarding friendships, suffered fewer problems in terms of
physical and mental health, and were even much more comfortable
being aggressive with others, compared to men with less mature
coping skills.

Wisdom isn’t limited to those who suffer a terrible tragedy when
they’re young.

But you also shouldn’t expect it to come just because you’ve had
a lot of birthdays.

Lifelong learning is a part of both knowledge and wisdom.

But if we want to be wise when we are old we may need to spend
less time today thinking about the world, and more time
understanding how it makes us feel.